'Ripoff’ Counter Counters Fiduciary Regulation Delay

The same folks who once referred to advisors as a “colony of termites” eating away at American’s retirement savings have now unveiled a “Retirement Ripoff Counter.”

The counter purports to show how much the delay in the fiduciary regulation is costing American savers. The clock assumes that every day that “conflicted advice” continues costs those savers $46 million a day, $1.9 million per hour, or $532 a second (based on the White House Council of Economic Advisers’ estimates that conflicted advice solely for IRA mutual fund investments and annuities within IRAs costs Americans $17 billion per year). The Economic Policy Institute, a think tank focused on the economic condition of low- and middle-income workers, has estimated that the 60-day delay would cost retirement savers $3.7 billion.

It was unveiled yesterday at an event headlined by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, along with Americans for Financial Reform and the Consumer Federation of America — an event during which, they noted, the cost of delaying the rule rose $1.9 million.

And if that weren’t enough, they arranged to project that counter last night onto the sides of two buildings in Washington, D.C.: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has been a party in the litigation seeking to overturn the fiduciary regulation, and the Department of Labor, which though it just issued a regulation delaying the applicability date of the rule, continues to defend the regulation in court.

The counter’s authors have also created a webpage that will allow individuals to comment on the Labor Department’s comment page on the regulation.

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